


Sermon in Stone

by inamac



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Parseltongue, pediophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-14
Updated: 2011-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-21 09:53:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inamac/pseuds/inamac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He hid the diadem in the castle, the night he asked Dumbledore to let him teach!" said Harry.<br/></p><div class="center">
<br/><i>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Ch 31</i>
<br/></div>
            </blockquote>





	Sermon in Stone

# Sermon in Stone

Coming back to Hogwarts was coming home. Though it was a home the Master of the house had recently departed, and the new Headmaster had already set about sweeping out the old ideals and making changes to more than the furniture.

As he swept through the once-familiar castle the man whose followers knew him as Lord Voldemort considered the interview that had just taken place. His request to join the staff of the school had been carefully phrased, his reasons well rehearsed. And of course Dumbledore had refused him. Ever since they had first met, Albus had set down rules for him to follow, and made it clear that the punishment, if he failed, would be a denial of what he most desired. He had always been very careful not to invite punishment. At least not of that sort. He had been a model student. First in all his classes, perfect Prefect and, eventually, Head Boy.

And he had been careful to seek privilege rather than punishment. He had laid the groundwork for today's visit carefully. Oh, Albus had clearly been suspicious of his reasons for asking for a teaching post, and had been so smugly delighted to be able to turn him down that he had not looked for another motive. The newly appointed Headmaster had not even taken the precaution of having him chaperoned to and from his study. One day Albus's naive trust would be his downfall.

So there was no one to see him turn his steps to the staircase leading to the seventh floor, and along the corridor to a place that only he had ever found. The Hidden Room still opened on his command, and he stepped through, intent on carrying out his true purpose for coming to the School, to secret the Object among the detritus of centuries.

The Room had not changed since his last visit, although he had. Cold winter sun glowed through the narrow lancet windows, laying arrows of light over the jumble of objects forming a maze of passages within the cathedral-like space. The wizard who had been Tom Riddle (and how he had hated Dumbledore for insisting on using that long-sloughed name), scarcely needed the illumination. He moved confidently along the aisles, turning at well-remembered landmarks, pausing to note where his telltales confirmed that no other foot had disturbed this place since last he had visited, despite the lack of the dust and cobwebs of centuries.

 _Tom Riddle_ had discovered the Room in his first year when hunting among the portraits and tapestries of the castle for someone who could answer his questions about his past, his heritage and his destiny. Barnabas the Barmy, faded and moth-eaten, had long since ceased to have any interaction with the world outside the frame of his tapestry, despite repeated questioning. The boy had turned away in frustration, to find himself facing a door that he could not recall having seen before. What lay beyond was a treasure-trove of Hogwarts history, items which must have been banished by generations of wizards as too dangerous or embarrassing to keep in the open. Tom had never thought to question where things that had been _banished_ by spellcraft went but it seemed that he had found the answer.

At first he had confined his exploration to the books, ancient scrolls and parchment palimpsests that described forbidden spells and forgotten history. It had not been until his third visit that he discovered the statue of Salazar Slytherin standing in a corner, a glass-fronted bookshelf on one side and a brass bedstead on the other. The statue was clearly the work of a skilled sculptor. Carved from a single multi-coloured veined piece of marble, Salazar's green robes seemed to flow over pale white flesh, while the red mottled shape of the wizard's signature serpent lay coiled at his feet.

He had been thrilled to find it. Here was the ultimate answer to his questions. If Salazar Slytherin could be made to speak... He remembered reaching out a hand to caress the cold marble, half expecting it to stir to life under his touch alone. But the spells to charm the memories of a living person into stone and wood rather than paint and canvas, had been long since lost. He smiled coldly, annoyed with his younger self that it had taken him so long, three more visits, to realise that he was in a room dedicated to lost things. But when he had, on that long ago spring morning, he had turned his attention to the bookshelves with renewed purpose.

Even then it had taken him two years, and long hours of research both within the Room and in other, less pleasant places, before he had stood before the cold marble and used the spells he had learned to charm the spirit of the once-living wizard into this vessel. Then he had had three more years sitting at the feet of the master wizard learning skills that had been lost for centuries. And learning the language of his birthright; parseltongue.

Now, aware that his time was limited, but unable to resist the opportunity to renew the only real relationship he had ever had with another person, he stopped before the statue, taking in the familiar form, the sculpted texture of his hair, his beard, the raised embroidery on his robes, and, resting in the marble hollow of his throat, the representation of the locket which he had created in life and passed down his line, to come at last to his true heir.

Voldemort reached to his own throat, pulling at the chain to free the silver chased original of the carved jewel from its place of concealment beneath his robe. He did not really need to compare them to know that the locket he had taken over Hepzibah Smith's dead body had genuinely belonged to Salazar Slytherin. With his fingers still closed around the hard metal he knelt at the feet of the statue and laid his free hand on the head of the carved snake. His voice was soft, barely above a whisper, but seemed to fill every space in the vast room.

 _"Esurah cedeth Slytherin. Ha abeya, ha sharra, s'eth sussur."_

There was a breathless moment as the magic worked, and then the serpent morphed beneath his hand. The cold, carved scales suffused with warmth and it butted its blunt head into the palm of his hand, the forked tongue flicking out to test the dusty air of the chamber. Tom caressed it absently as he watched the transfiguration which had begun with the snake flow along its coils and up into the folds of its master's robe, making the heavy fabric shift as the newly awakened body beneath it moved and stretched. Marble given life. The oldest enchantment in the history of magic.

The Egyptian priests fleeing before Moses' transformed staff, Pygmalion embracing Galatea, could not have felt as satisfied as Tom Riddle did in this moment.

"You have grown," Salazar's first words were, as always, a hoarse whisper, "and changed. How long has it been?"

"Since I was last here? Twelve years."

There was a long pause as the Founder waited for the honourific 'Sir,' with which the boy had always addressed him in their past, and realised that it would not be forthcoming from this young man. "So," he said at last, "More than your countenance and age has changed. By what name would you have the world remember you?"

"Voldemort," he said, releasing his hold on the snake's head and drawing himself up to his full height. His eyes met those of the statue on a level now. "Lord Voldemort."

A frown passed over the marble features. " _Lord_ Voldemort? A Muggle title? In my day wizards were content to advise Muggle Princes, we did not seek to emulate them."

"Times change."

"Indeed." Salazar turned his head to sweep what little he could see of the room in which his effigy had been interred. "Schoolboys aspire to become Lords, and the memories of respected wizards are confined to lumber rooms. Changed times indeed." He turned his face back to the young man. "Why have you come to disturb me this time?"

Voldemort hesitated. It was true that he had not returned to the school intending to speak again with Salazar Slytherin's statue. He had intended only to leave the diadem in this safest of hiding places and then depart. But Dumbledore had goaded him with that old accusation that he knew nothing of the magic power of love.

 _"Perhaps,_ " the old man had said, _"you have been looking in the wrong places"_ .

His response had been an ironic one, at the time. _"Well, what better place to start my researches than at Hogwarts?"_ But in the walk back from Dumbledore's office he had realised that if there had ever been a gap in his knowledge he had always had the means, within Hogwarts, to remedy it. He could consult the one teacher he had ever really respected – or, as Dumbledore would doubtless put it, loved.

"I have come," he replied, reaching out a hand to rest his palm over the statue's unbeating heart, "to learn about 'love'."

Salazar smiled, teeth marble-white against the shadows of his beard. "I see," he said. "Then come here."

The command was reinforced by a hissed aside to the serpent, which threw a coil around Voldemort's waist and drew the two wizards into a close embrace. The eyes of the younger widened, blood-suffused whites almost a mirror of the carved marble ones.

"Very good." Salazar sounded amused. He raised his hands to reinforce the grasp of the serpent, cupping the young man's face between his fingers and bringing his pale lips down on the flushed pink ones in a devouring kiss.

Voldemort had no choice but to open to the hard probing tongue. He shivered, though not from the chill of the room. This was so wrong, and so wanted. The magic with which he had given the statue the semblance of life curled around him, taking his desires and transmuting them into action. Both of their robes had fallen open, and he found himself pressed flesh to marble, the barely-raised nubs of the statue's carved nipples scraped across his own, making them harden to much more defined peaks, as flushed as his cock, where it rested on the cold carved sacs of Salazar's sex. Voldemort gasped into the kiss as Salazar's long, flawlessly smooth fingers curled around him, making a perfectly dimensioned channel for him to thrust into. The sensation was entirely alien, but wholly arousing. He could not have stopped if commanded to do so by the Founder himself.

As if the thought had communicated itself to the statue, Salazar released his mouth and turned his head, lips touching Voldemort's ear, tongue flicking like a serpent's as he spoke.

 _"Cycienne,"_ he whispered, and Voldemort gripped the broad shoulders with a force that would have bruised a human partner.

 _"Sheearth,"_ he commanded, and Voldemort thrust, mindlessly.

 _"Sennev,"_ he soothed, and Voldemort groaned as the fingers around him denied release.

 _"Ha mathara seh,"_ he admonished, as Voldemort screamed with frustration, and the tail of the serpent rose and fell with the force of an oiled bullwhip across his buttocks, and _"Kyrere,"_ he praised, as Voldemort's seed spilled from him, painting new veins of cream across the green, grey and red marble.

 

"So," Voldemort said, when the snake had released him and he could step away and re-fasten his robes to respectability, "That is the power of love?"

Salazar's expressionless eyes met his. "That is a demonstration of one form of love. Lust is its most useful, and easily manipulated manifestation."

Voldemort nodded. "Then it is the only form of interest to me," he said. He pulled his wand from its holder and levelled it at the statue. "As always, my thanks for your instruction. It was most... interesting. I regret that we are unlikely to speak again. _Finite Incantatum_!"

Then he turned and walked away from the lifeless statue, from the diadem, from the Hidden Room, and from his final lesson.

~The End of Tom Riddle's story, and the Beginning of the reign of Lord Voldemort.~


End file.
